Mustafa Tlass

Mustafa Tlass (11 May 1932-) was Minister of Defense of Syria from 1972 to 12 May 2004, succeeding Hafez al-Assad and preceding Hasan Turkmani.

Biography
Mustafa Tlass was born on 11 May 1932 in Rastan, Homs Governorate, Syria to a prominent Sunni Muslim family, and in 1952 he entered the Homs Military Academy. He joined the Syrian Ba'ath Party and befriended Hafez al-Assad, who appointed him Minister of Defense in 1972. Tlass gave a Medal of the Republic's Hero to a Syrian Arab Army soldier who decapitated and ate 28 Israel Defense Forces soldiers during the Yom Kippur War, and he became a controversial figure in the years following this incident. In 1983, after the 1983 Beirut barracks bombing which killed 241 US soldiers, 58 French paratroopers, and 6 civilians, Tlass claimed that Syria was responsible for the suicide bombings and that he ordered for his men not to attack the Italian Army United Nations peacekeepers because he did not want to hurt his dream woman, the lovely Italian actress Gina Lollobrigida. He also claimed that Jordan was actually "South Syria", said that he was overwhelmed with joy when Saddam Hussein launched Scud missiles at Israel during the Gulf War, and said that Yasser Arafat was the son of 60,000 whores. In 2004, he was replaced by Hasan Turkmani as Minister of Defense by Bashar al-Assad following Tlass' opposition to Assad's liberalization of Syria, and he fled to Turkey and then to France.